Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
10 24 2025
A Different Light – The Gym During a Heart Attack –
The Meaning of a Life Rewritten
I have a dear friend battling cancer. Still a young, beautiful mother grappling with the uncertainty of what the next few years may hold. Was my past life worth it? Did I do myself, my family, or my God proud for the last 60 years? As I took in her story, it made me take a deep look at my life.
I pray it will help you see clearly into your own.
My life has been a myriad of choices … some noble, some necessary, some made with good intentions that quietly veered off course. What if everything I ever dreamed of was the wrong thing? Maybe not all wrong, but definitely shallow, and too often self-serving. Not evil, not wasteful —
just wrong for me, and for the calling that was on my life.
Like going to the gym during a heart attack … taking action, but the wrong kind.
Two years ago, I was at the beach for my daughter’s 21st birthday, blowing out the candles on my way to a sudden triple bypass surgery the next day.
We spend so much time chasing the good times, chasing better, but rarely stop to ask what better really means … often with no time left to make it right.
We live in patterns: shower, work, eat, repeat. The occasional joy, the periodic pain. Births and deaths, beginnings and endings. But the rhythm of life stays almost identical … like Groundhog Day with new faces and slightly different clothes. Yet underneath it all, the same longing remains:
Why am I here, and am I living for what lasts?
But doesn’t one have to slow down to even think about that first?
What is a happy life? Is it comfort? Safety? I think so … but it’s more. Where is presence — being fully here for the people we love? Where is love in life’s equation of joyful and dreadful?
To memorize their faces, to photograph their laughter into our hearts, to say the words we once feared to speak. Maybe happiness isn’t about what we achieve, but what we absorb.
Still, something deeper calls … and aren’t you glad for that?
But can we truly change the path if we only rearrange the scenery?
Can a few new habits rewrite the soul?
Or must we change tracks entirely and redefine what it means to be alive?
Who teaches us that truth?
His Light, My Life
There’s a kind of transformation that feels like a paradigm shift, but it’s really more like being born again. Not just believing differently, but seeing differently.
Faith whispers that meaning isn’t discovered in the mirror of self-fulfillment,
but in the reflection of divine purpose.
How easy that is to miss.
The doorway to the world is broad but not so easy; the doorway to eternity is narrow — a quiet path lit only by a promise.
And yet, that narrow path … though harder … is where freedom hides. Where joy stops being an emotion and becomes a condition of the soul.
Where life becomes less about doing the right thing and more about being the right person.
What if inspiration begins not with the world admiring you, but with you remembering
who you are in God?
What if the highest form of success isn’t reaching the top, but realizing the view was never the point?
I wish someone could have taught me that 50 years ago.
So, what is the meaning of your life … not in the grand scope of decades (I’m almost 76), but in the small window of the last seven days?
Where did love show up?
Where did grace interrupt your plans?
Where did truth nudge you awake?
If the world offers us wide doors that lead to comfort, and God offers a narrow one that leads to life… then maybe the purpose isn’t to make the world brighter, but to learn how to walk toward the light.
Someone once said, “Live every day as if it were your last, because one of these days it will be.”
And I’ve come to see how true that is.
A part of me had to die before I could truly live — and that’s what Jesus taught, and the prophets too.
Walking toward the light is a start.
But living in the light, for the light — that’s the answer.
That’s where life stops being self-made and becomes God-breathed.
And today, after all these years, I am certain of that truth.
His truth.
Jesus.
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Waymaker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsypFJ5mNw0
